$upporting The Wire

It's important

The great music magazine The Wire, fast approaching its 500th issue, due out this October, is suffering financial difficulties. The publication, for which I write on occasion, has set up a donation page, available at a PayPal address, which is also accessible via this QR code. A recent call they put out for donations has put them on better financial standing than they had been, and this new round of donations is to give them a stronger overall foundation. Alternately or additionally, you might subscribe.

And visit The Wire at thewire.co.uk.

Scratch Pad: Fog Horns, Ponzi Schemes

From the past week

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ It doesn’t seem that windy, but the Golden Gate Bridge is singing like nobody’s business

▰ Nothing like waking up to fog horns

▰ Books are a Ponzi scheme. Every time I finish reading one, I wanna read several more.

▰ One good thing about selling music gear is you don’t just get rid of the gear, you get rid of another box.  And if you carry the package by foot to the post office, you feel even lighter after mailing it.

▰ Been in three group book clubs and one two-person book club this year, and there’s nothing like reading a book with other people — more dutiful, perhaps, but so much more insight, and I pay a different sort of attention.

▰ This week in #dronescrolling: Dunno if I’ll do this regularly or not, but it occurs to me I might, as part of the social media summary (slash digital life self-assessment) that I compile at the end of each week, post some mentions of solid things other people posted. Here are a few: Jeremy Wentworth regularly uploads short clips of his VCV Rack (i.e., modular synthesizer in software form) patches on his Mastodon account. The musician Dave Seidel, aka mysterybear, posted a janky yet photogenic jury-rigged stereo-mono adapter on Threads. Femi Shonuga-Fleming (aka Sadnoise) posted, on Instagram, a massive steel horn art object he made with Enid Corcoran. And these next are actually from a little earlier in the month, but Jeremy Bushnell published on Bluesky a bunch of photos of musicians performing at the recent Cleveland Re:Sound event, including Keith Fullerton Whitman and Maria Chávez.

“without … desire of victory”

Junto ethos

I’ve given* dozens of talks, presentations, interviews, and lectures about the Disquiet Junto music community over the past 13 years, and Benjamin Franklin, who first coined the word “junto,” remains a deep well I keep going back to. I’ve shared this mention of Franklin’s original 1727 Junto (from his autobiography) many times, and each time I’ve always been sure to underline what’s seen here in purple.

And yet only now have I noticed the additional part, which I’ve underlined in red, about “without … desire of victory.” One thing I was certain about the Disquiet Junto from the start, back in January 2012, was that it wasn’t going to be a competition. And now I realize that was part of Franklin’s own plan from the start.

*most recently for Donnell Alexander and Lev Anderson’s West Coast Sojourn podcast and at the Lines meet-up at Mission Synths earlier this this month

Bosch’s Pre-Echoes

More from the Michael Connelly novels

This following bit is from The Black Ice, the second novel in the series by Michael Connelly about Los Angeles police detective Hieronymus Bosch:

I love that Connelly, back in 1993, foresaw Eric Eberhardt’s long-running youarelistening.to project, You Are Listening to Los Angeles, which pairs meditative music and police scanners. The original site suffers today from the inevitable situation in which embeds stop functioning dependably (something my own site’s older posts are rife with), but you can check out recordings in Eberhardt’s NTS.live show.

The author Warren Ellis, in his 2013 novel Gun Machine, quotes his own fictional detective, John Tallow of the NYPD, referencing Eberhardt’s work:

Eberhardt started You Are Listening to Los Angeles in 2011 and later expanded it to other cities. As he said to Roman Mars on the 99% Invisible podcast, “Some people think it’s peaceful. Some people think it’s creepy.”